


your body's poetry, speak to me

by beneath_my_marred_skin



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fae, Dark Magic, Eleven/Mike Wheeler-Centric, F/M, Fae Eleven, Fae Magic, Forbidden Love, mike wheeler is really really in love with eleven
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-07-24
Packaged: 2019-02-27 17:27:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13253073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beneath_my_marred_skin/pseuds/beneath_my_marred_skin
Summary: The beauty of being young is that whenever someone tells you something isn't real - you don't have to believe them.---They tell him that what he feels isn't real. That it's a spell, a result of the magic in her veins, the glamour on her skin; her very nature insures that he fall in love with her. It's induced, forced, inexorable - it's dangerous.It isn't necessarily that Mike thinks they're wrong.It's just that he doesn't care.





	1. i want to drink you in like oxygen

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Sia's 'Move Your Body'.
> 
> Chapter title also from Sia; 'House on Fire'.

The first time Mike Wheeler sees her, he is five, and he is lost in the woods.

He sniffles at the base of an oak tree as old as Hawkins itself, his knees scraped and snot dripping down his face.

Mike knows he isn’t supposed to play in the woods. His mother has warned him against it since he was old enough to toddle off.

“There are nothing but trees in the woods,” she told him. “There’s no landmark or way for me to find you quickly. It’s just a big maze, Mikey.”

Then she would pet his hair and make a big deal out of watching him play in the neat, trimmed backyard.

He remembers this now, just as he had before he, Lucas, and Will decided to play that afternoon.

Will’s house is nestled more thickly in nature than the Wheelers’ or the Sinclairs’; Mike’s father says this is because Will’s family doesn’t have as much money as Mike or Lucas’ parents. But Mike knows his saying so would hurt Mrs. Byers’ feelings, and it would make Jonathan’s face all grumpy, and Will’s eyes would get sad, so Mike doesn’t mention it.

If anything, Mike likes the Byers’ place more. He always gets his shoes muddy, and he and Lucas and Will always end up outside, sweating and breathing heavy. It makes Mike feel big and strong to have an ache in his legs and a tan on his arms.

He didn’t have a mistrust of the woods like his mother, or a disdain for dirt like his father, so when Lucas and Will ran off into the forest, shooting fake guns and slinging play swords, Mike had run after, smiling and screaming his own battle cry.

Now, Mike has wandered into the thick of the woods, his friends long gone. He thinks he must have been going in circles for hours, trying to find the exit or the entrance, or some place that isn’t just _trees_.

The sun has gone down, and the evening chill is nipping at his exposed arms and legs, and he’s _crying_ like a big, stupid baby. He wonders if Lucas and Will have told their moms, or if they’re too scared of getting in trouble and haven’t said anything at all.

He thinks of Lucas’ big wooden table, and Will’s little kitchen, thinks of them safe and warm, thinks of Nancy getting all the meatloaf and eating all of the after-dinner cookies, and he begins to sob in earnest.

The next moment lives etched into Mike Wheeler’s brain forever:

Out of the darkness, a ball of light, like bright, white fire, leaps into existence.

Mike feels his chest seize with a gasp, and he scrambles back against his tree. For a moment, he thinks it’s a flashlight, and he feels his heart rush up into his throat. He gets to his feet before he realizes that there’s no silhouette behind the light, and no handle connected to the beam.

He inches closer, but just as his fingertips are about to brush the sparkling orb, it seems to burst at the seams, puffing out of existence like smoke.

It reforms a few feet ahead of Mike, glittering and beckoning, and he reaches out to catch the light again, before the process repeats, and a new fiery ball is just at arm’s length once more.

Nevertheless, Mike keeps bounding forward, trying to close his hands around the little lanterns.

He finds himself laughing, running so fast that his hair flies back. The lights illuminate the forest floor and glitter in the waxy reflections of leaves and stray puddles. It’s like Christmas lights, almost; magical and twinkly in a way that warms Mike’s heart and spreads all the way to the tips of his toes.

Joy, Mike thinks as he spins in circles through a line of lights, this is joy.

Then Mike is stumbling out of the woods, tripping over sticks and his shoelaces. He huffs, cheeks pink, staring at the clearing that leads back into his neighborhood.

He turns back, mouth open, staring into the woods that had ensnared him completely. Woods, what seems like moments ago, he was certain he’d spend all night in.

This time two white lights appear at once, winking at him in the darkness.

Mike’s heart skips a beat. “Bye bye,” he whispers, his breath whistling through his missing tooth.

When he runs up to his doorway, the police chief’s car is sitting out front. The door is unlocked, and he tracks mud on the floor when he comes in. The clock on the mantle reads eight o’clock.

His mother, in tears, sits at the kitchen table with a harried-looking Mrs. Byers, and a stony faced Chief Hopper.

“How long’s he been missing?” Hopper is asking, his voice gruff. He stands apart from where Mike’s mom blubbers into Mrs. Byers’ shirt sleeve.

“L-last time I saw him was around two this afternoon.” She sounds positively guilt ridden, patting Mike’s mom’s hair awkwardly. “Then about two hours later, Will and Lucas came back to - to my house, and they said that he’d wandered off…”

Mike’s shoes squeak on the hardwood and all three adults’ heads snap up.

For a moment everyone is frozen in their place.

Mike gulps. “Am I getting arrested?”

“Oh, Mike!”

His nostrils are flooded with the scent of his mother’s perfume as she engulfs him and lifts him up as though he’s a little baby again, crushing him in the cage of her arms and chest. Nancy tramples her way down the stairs and joins them, tears streaming, and Mike feels his own lip quiver.

Mrs. Byers hovers, waving uncertainly. Mike grins back, but it falters when the chief meets his gaze, eyes unreadable.

“How’d you find your way out?” Hopper asks him a little later, after a call is made to the station and Mike has a mug of milk in his hands.

Mike looks away from the episode of Scooby-Doo playing on the living room television. His eyes flick warily back to where his mother and Mrs. Byers are whispering in the kitchen, packing leftovers into Tupperware.

He and Hopper stare at each other for a moment before Mike begins to sweat a little.

“I just followed the light,” Mike replies, fiddling with a chipped edge on his mug.

Hopper presses his lips together, squinting at him. Mike fights not to squirm.

“Stay out of the woods,” he says, and Mike nods hurriedly.

Hopper turns toward the door, before he pauses. He turns back to Mike, fixing him with a stern look.

He points his finger, voice pitched too low for the moms to hear. “And next time you’re staying out of the woods, make sure you stick with your friends.”

Mike smiles. “Yes sir.”

Mike’s mother tucks him into bed that night, checking him over twice for scrapes and cuts, despite his frantic protesting.

He doesn’t tell her about the lights. Nor does he mention the whispered giggles that had echoed through the trees – a girl’s giggles.

Mike especially does not mention the pair of dark, beautiful eyes that had glinted back at him through the darkness – pinpricks of starlight hanging at eye level, which had seen him off.

\---

The second time Mike sees her, he’s ten, and he has a flower in his hair.

He’s twice as old as he was during their first encounter, and he’s managed to half-convince himself that it was nothing; that stress and the haze of childishness that comes with being five had lead him to remember his brief solitude in the woods as far more whimsical than it really had been.

And the unconvinced half, well. He ignores that part.

That is, until he sees her again.

She has a body this time, and it startles the breath out of him.

He’d managed to wander away from his friends again – Lucas, Will, and now, Dustin. Dustin’s a newer addition, with a divorced mother and a mouthful of missing teeth. He smiles bigger than anyone Mike’s ever met, and he always goes along with Mike’s fancies without the persuasion the others require.

“Fancies” being a disdainful term Mike’s father has taken to using whenever Mike details his findings and research on mythological beings, and the signs of their existence in Hawkins. Ted would rather Mike play soccer or flag football, so Mike doesn’t bring up anything having to do with magic at home anymore.

Well, except whenever he attempts to explain Dungeons & Dragons to his family, but he does that less and less these days too. He finds that if he doesn’t mention it, his father can’t sigh pointedly, his mother won’t insist it’s just a phase, and Nancy doesn’t have the opportunity roll her eyes and act like she’s so above him now that she’s a _teenager_. He’s a geek in silence, and his family ignores it.

This time, he and the boys were biking into town for the ice cream parlor’s Tuesday two-for-one special on ice cream sundaes.

And Mike, geek that he is, just swears that he sees a flash of _someone_ out of the corner of his eye.

He thinks he sees someone quite a lot, often enough that his friends have come to expect it of him. On their treks to school, on shortcuts between one another’s houses, during exploring sessions – Mike’s eyes catch on blurs between tree trunks or twinkling orbs in the distance.

The guys have learned to take it in stride, or tell him to come off it whenever he says anything. He tries not to, because they’re quickly creeping up on the age where chasing fairies is embarrassing.

But he has a feeling this time.

He is not in control of his own limbs when he brakes, letting his friends get farther and farther ahead of him. He tells himself he’ll catch up.

He steps as lightly as he can through thickets and brambles, tingling all the way to the tips of his fingers. Mike’s ears ring with a certain silvery laugh, and in his mind’s eye he can see the shimmer of dark eyes – a frequenter of his dreams since that night.

The sunshine glares into his eyes, and as he makes to shade them with his hands, a little entanglement of thorns catches his foot and sends him tumbling down and over the uneven ground.

Spitting curses, Mike drags himself to his feet, brushing off his jacket and jeans. He flexes his fingers – skinned, with his palms stinging and bleeding from a scattering of gashes. He curses again, shaking leaves and twigs from his hair.

He’s starts stomping his way back to his bike, his pride having taken the biggest hit of all, when he hears the wind whisper with movement behind him.

Mike spins with a triumphant noise, hands poised to catch.

Nothing.

“Dammit,” Mike whispers, dropping his arms. He hears the crinkle of leaves, and tip toes forward.

He flashes back to half a decade ago, weaving between trees and following the swooping feeling overtaking his stomach. He has no lights to guide him now, and he isn’t even certain what he is looking for, but something in his blood pulls him forward.

Mike’s breath whooshes from his lungs when he sees it.

He recognizes it from books. The library holds many old, dusty tomes with sinister font, or in stark contrast, fairy tale books that are bedazzled, glorified picture books. He gets basically the same information from both varieties. According to both, at his feet, is supposedly one of the most dangerous natural phenomena he could stumble upon.

A fairy ring.

It makes Mike chuckle just to think about it – this little circle of mushrooms in the dewy grass, the pinnacle of an adorable nature scene, is a portal to another world.

Every book or frilly pink guide that Mike has ever opened has advised supreme caution when it comes to fairy rings. Seeing them is supposed to be good luck, and yet, “entering” one could be bad luck.

Bearing this in mind, Mike feels a little thrill as he lifts his foot over the little circle. His head is fuzzy, and he doesn’t think much past the need to find those eyes, that laugh.

“DON’T!”

Mike then falls back on his butt.

His mind clears so quickly he gets a headache, blinking the haze away from his eyes. Horror sets in, along with the realization that his mind had been taken away from him for a moment, that he had been controlled by a force so sweet and compelling that he hadn’t even realized it was poisoning him.

And then _she_ is standing above him, and those eyes – they _were_ real – are piercing straight through him, bright as the moon.

Mike feels the breath knocked out of him, yet again, as he gazes up at her.

 _She’s got me_ , he thinks blearily, his thoughts foggy and processing much too slowly. _She’s totally got me._

Her features are little and dainty, and the slope of her shoulders is much too graceful to be human. Her hair is dark brown, curling into little ringlets piled on top of her head. Her clothes seem to be woven from the forestry around them, settling over her marble skin in a whisper of flowers and leaves.

She moves on the tips of her toes, like at any moment she might spring into the air and flit away from him.

She keeps her distance, eying him as though he might suddenly coil into an attack mode.

“Sorry,” he says, soft, to break the silence, and her big, dark eyes widen still bigger.

Mike feels his blood rush hot.

She licks her lips, hovering a step closer. “The ring.”

Her voice is just like the laugh which had guided him through the woods when he was small – breathy and tinkling, like jingle bells or the _tink_ of little candies spilling into a bowl or the chirrup of tiny, springtime birds.

“Not safe.” Each word is stilted, as though she’s having trouble stringing sentences together. “It takes mortals.”

“Mortals?” Mike chokes, still entranced, but dimly aware that this information is very important to him, even if he can’t currently remember the reason. His eyes trip down her body again, but he doesn’t see gossamer wings or pointed ears. It confuses him.

He finds his voice again, getting to his feet. “Takes them?”

“Yes.” Her full lips twist together, and her eyes flit around them again. “You should not be here.”

“Takes them where?” He asks, insistent. The question seems to cause her physical distress, and she remains silent and enigmatic, unreadable. Her eyes are locked up tight.

“You must go,” she repeats, unyielding, and she edges away again. Mike would reach out and touch her if his limbs weren’t frozen at his sides. “You aren’t safe.”

“From fairies?” He blinks at her, unable to move his gaze away. His senses seem to be coming back to him, though she is no less dazzling. If anything, she seems to grow more beautiful the longer he looks.

“ _Shh_ ,” she hisses, and her hands spring out to clutch at his hands, and his skin lights itself on _fire._ “The Unseelie. If they see you, here…”

She shudders, and Mike thinks it’s the most graceful, swanlike thing he’s ever seen. His brain is desperately trying to catch up, but her mouth is forming words he doesn’t understand, and a very large part of him is still punch-drunk on her face.

“Wait, wait,” Mike blabbers, turning to close his hand around her little wrists as she pushes him out of the clearing. She jerks back, and Mike releases her instantly, shame flooding his insides.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry. Just,” his breath gusts out of him, heavy. “Can I… Can I see you again?”

She squints at him, her shining eyes sharp. “Why?”

“I want to know more,” Mike says, desperately, and at this point he’s just talking so that she’ll keep looking at him. “About you. About… about the Unseelie?”

She regards him, guarded. He itches all over, eyes catching on the severity of her frown, the mistrust written all over her face.

“Bad,” she whispers urgently, her eyes flashing. Her lips are nearly quivering, and her hands are curled into tight fists.

“Bad people?” Mike fights not to stutter, his heart jumping into his throat. “Bad f-fairies?”

She hushes him again, severe. “ _Go._ ”

The woods around them begin to shake; the leaves quiver and the wind is suddenly howling. Mike rightfully attributes the disturbance to the tears dancing in her eyes.

His legs twitch, urging him to run. But his heart wrenches painfully, like being wrung out or stretched taut. A noise of protest rips from his throat, and the beautiful, dangerous girl steps forward.

“Not here,” she says, her hands fluttering as though wanting to touch him, but not knowing whether she should. His skin longs for her to reach out. “I will come to you.”

“Okay,” he breathes in relief, blinking dumbly as the storm settles minutely. His insides flutter intensely.

He stares at her for a second longer, and for a moment, she seems just as enthralled as he is. Her eyes are even more captivating up close, he finds, counting her lashes and studying the shadows they cast on her cheeks. They move over his face, analytical, calculating. After a moment, he offers her a tentative smile.

“Go,” She bids him, shoving at his shoulders with wiry strength fit to bruise. He stumbles back, his limbs like noodles.

“Okay,” He says again. He shakes his head, like coming out of a dream. He thinks his ears pop. “Wait! Your name! I didn’t ask your name.”

She freezes, her shoulders seized as though caught in a trap.

Breaths coming heavy, she looks either way, as though someone may pop up and steal her away. She leans so close that their noses brush, and Mike feels his heart stop.

Her breath hits his face, sweet like honey. Her fingers brush his hair softly, like a ruffle of wind. She plucks a flower from his hair, twirling it between her fingers.

“Eleven,” she whispers, and Mike recognizes uncertainty in her eyes, but the curve of her mouth suggests daring; mischief.

He finds himself grinning. “I’m-”

“MIKE!”

Mike jumps out of his skin, whirling around. He hears the crunch of leaves beneath three pairs of sneakers, and the telltale wheeze of Will’s breath in the autumn air.

They find him alone, cheeks red. She’s gone.

In his hand, he holds a cluster of tiny orange flowers – a butterfly weed. He recognizes it from one of his books.

He places it on his windowsill that evening, squinting through the glass, waiting in a frenzy of stifled excitement and incredulity.

The butterfly weed sits on that windowsill for the next two years.

\---

The third time Mike sees her, it’s exactly eleven o’clock, and she’s in his backyard.

He’s up past his curfew, reading comics under the stealth of his covers. He hasn’t had a proper night’s sleep this entire month – December brings the twinkle of _fairy_ lights and tinkling bells. The moon seems to keep him awake, niggling at his eyes; it’s only when the yellow light of dawn creeps through his curtains that he can manage to sleep lately.

So when he hears a rustle of leaves and the snap of a few twigs, he’s immediately on his feet and at his window.

She looks so very out of place there, quiet and flighty, radiant and enchanting – completely at odds with Holly’s sandbox and the unused lawn chairs settled on the frozen grass.

She – _Eleven,_ his brain reminds him, unhelpful and pathetically excited – turns in a circle, lifting her hands to catch the sprinkling of snow falling from overhead. Her footsteps haven’t left tracks, Mike realizes belatedly.

As if sensing his eyes, Eleven swivels around to stare at his bedroom window. She lifts her dainty hand in a wave. Mike’s heart skips a beat.

He flies from his room and bounds down the stairs as quickly as he dares. He yanks open the backdoor, wincing when it creaks and disrupts the stillness of the evening. He waits, staring into the living room where his father snores in the La-Z-Boy.

When Ted does not stir, he turns back to the chill awaiting him to find himself face to face with Eleven.

“Shit!” He hisses, putting a hand over his heart. He glances back to his father again, ignoring the surprise coloring Eleven’s face. “You scared me.”

“Mike,” she whispers back in lieu of an apology. The reverent way her voice catches over the syllable of his name makes him shiver.

It comes to him that he’s supposed to be angry at her, but her scent makes him dizzy and his blood is warm and floaty. He tries to summon his ire, but everything about her makes him calm and content.

Delicately, he reaches for her wrist, pulling her inside and down the steps to the basement. It feels strange, her angelic presence in his parents’ mundane house. But she does not protest, nor do her little bare feet make a sound.

When the door clicks shut and locked, Mike rounds on her. He feels a storm churning inside of his chest – he thinks of the nights he waited, the way he’s hovered at the woods’ edge, the stupid butterfly weed dried and long dead still resting on his bedroom windowsill.

How sometimes, he’s sat outside, breathing her name in a puff of vapor and blue lips, hoping she would answer.

Incredulously, he considers the nonsensicalness of it all; the way she managed to crawl beneath his skin and burrow her way into all of his nooks and crannies. The way he even now questions whether she’s real, questions _what_ she is, and questions why she’s so important. How on earth is it possible that he has no idea who she is, and yet he feels she is the precipice on which his very life rests?

Mike can’t come up with anything. He’s sat on the same problem for what feels like his entire life, and he’s only answered with nameless feelings that are warm and achy, feelings which swell and threaten to burst.

Inexplicably, his eyes well with tears.

Eleven, for her part, looks horrified.

“Mike,” she says in that same way; like he hung the moon and stars. Like he’s the marvel between the two of them. She hovers, the way she always does, unsure of her place. Her eyes are like two giant, dark saucers – big as a doe’s. Her hands flutter up, not touching him but half-reaching, panicked.

Mike sniffles, embarrassed. He wipes at his eyes, stepping closer despite his better judgement. Everything feels amplified when she’s near. He feels, idiotically, like an overflowing bathtub, just spilling and spilling his contents all over her.

“You were gone for so long,” he says finally. He wants to reach for her, but, again, he’s quickly realizing that he barely knows her, _and_ she’s the prettiest girl he’s ever seen. Something about her leaves him equal parts thrilled and terrified, in a way no one else has ever been able to incite.

“I thought… I thought maybe you weren’t coming back.”

Her eyebrows twitch in surprise, and Mike can see every single snowflake resting in her curls, nestled and sparkling like they belong there. Everything about her always seems to glitter.

She’s as beautiful as he remembers. He had wondered, in her absence, whether he had created a more fanciful version of her in his mind.

The mere thought is crushed as he takes in her slender collarbones and the gentle hollow of her cheeks. The unmarred, glowing finish of her skin, the pink of her cheeks, and the bow of her mouth. Her eyes still sparkle like twin stars, blinking at him from beneath fans of lashes. She’s fantastical, unreal.

She touches his hand, featherlike, and he almost falls to his knees.

“Time is different here,” Eleven breathes, apologetic as the fingertips now resting at his elbow. Her face is sorrowful, and Mike feels she could convince him to do _anything_ with those eyes.

“Human years are fast. Like minutes,” she still stumbles with words, like English is especially awkward on her tongue.

“Oh,” Mike hears himself say, abashed. Blinking, he tries to wrap his brain around that.

Mike’s had two birthdays since he’s seen her last. He’s spent the past two years waiting and agonizing, jumping out of his skin every time he sees a perm. And for her, it’s practically the same day. He feels supremely stupid.

“I thought you just forgot about me.”

She almost looks offended.

“I don’t forget.” Her voice is serious, absolute. He sees something dangerous flicker in her eyes, ancient and unyielding.

It stirs something inside Mike that too feels ancient; bigger than himself. Something he cannot name.

Her eyes rove over his face. One of her delicate hands settles on his face, grabbing at his chin and turning his face side to side. Mike feels his cheeks redden, reminded vividly of family gatherings and old, wrinkled aunts who caterwaul about how big he’s gotten.

“Different,” Eleven says instead, frowning. She puts her hands on his shoulders and steps onto her tip toes to try and see over his head.

Mike chuckles, rubbing at the back of his hair, gratified by the skin to skin contact. “Uh, yeah, my mom says I had a growth spurt.”

Her brows furrow, and Mike makes note of a dimple between her eyebrows.

“Growth spurt?” She repeats, as she leans forward to press her ear against his chest, face intent.

Mike’s stomach erupts with butterflies.

“Uh, yeah, it’s just, um, a time where you grow a lot,” he squeaks when she pulls her head up to meet his eyes.

She always seems to stare right through him, like her eyes can pick apart everything in his brain, and he finds it entirely too captivating. As though he could stare back until he got lost and it was impossible to find his way out. Like he wouldn’t want to find his way out.

Eleven stares directly at his mouth, and Mike’s brain is so totally melting.

“Your voice,” she says, pressing a finger against his Adam’s apple. He tries not to gulp.

“Part of the – the growth spurt,” he stammers, clearing his throat and trying to pitch his voice lower without being too conspicuous.

She makes a little noise of interest, and then steps back. Mike’s body aches in protest at the loss of her warmth and soft hands, so he follows.

A silvery laugh bubbles from her throat, and Mike feels an intense rush of pride at making her smile.

Dimly, he’s aware of the sensible part of his brain telling him that he probably shouldn’t be so wrapped up in her already. This is their third time meeting. Also, he suspects that she’s some sort of magical creature, potentially endowed with the capabilities to harm him or at least enslave him.

A larger, rose-tinted part of his brain is too busy being completely dazzled by her presence to care.

“Pretty,” Eleven grants him softly, fingers trailing along his bangs. Mike feels a full body shudder wrack his bones, like he’s been electrocuted.

“Yeah,” Mike agrees fervently, daring to thumb at one of her hands. “Really pretty.”

He’s so fucked.


	2. i was just an only child of the universe, and then i found you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "Last of the Real Ones" by Fall Out Boy.

Eleven is a number, not a name.

A fact made all too clear to Eleven throughout her lifetime.

It is a representation of her birth, of her place. Indicative of her dispensability, of her status as merely one of the unvalued.

\---

He calls her ‘El’.

“Short for Eleven,” he, _Mike_ , says, and it warms her all over.

Where she comes from, there is power in a name. Names are the way into a soul, names can be held against you. Mortals who offer their names are foolish; to hand over your mantle to a fae is to give them the key to everything you are.

The fact that Eleven does not technically have a name makes her very low, in her world. She has no power, no bartering chips, no secret gift to keep close to her heart. She has never been allowed a secret. She has nothing useful, nothing to exchange; fae interaction is based on give and take, something for something – deals, trades.

She has nothing, so she will get nothing.

Yet, in giving Mike her number, she unwittingly gave him a show of great trust. She hadn’t meant to say, but something about seeing him in her woods, about his clear eyes and desperate breaths had made her feel weak, and uncomfortably hot, and yet thrilled somehow.

In return, Mike gives her a term of endearment, a short name. She understands that this is a token of affection between humans. All she can think is that, if nothing else, she’s not a number to him.

She marks this as her first trade. She marks herself as Mike’s equal. It delights her.

Before, when mortals were more privy to magic and the Fair Folk, it was customary to give a short name or an alias in order to avoid a fae’s thrall.

“Mike is short for Michael,” Mike told her, blasé and unconcerned. She is not sure whether he too is showing her his trust, or is simply ignorant of the risk he takes with every word spoken to her. Regardless, she vows, silently, to protect his name.

“Michael,” she lets it lie on her tongue, considering. “Like the angel.”

She knows of human lore; the stories about a messiah and virgins and an all-powerful man called god. It moves her, the things humans come up with to comfort themselves against the cruelty of nature and the fickleness of fate. She knows what it is to feel alone in a world so much bigger and meaner than oneself.

She, of course, takes a more mild view of mortals than most of her people. Her court in particular would call humans perverse and idiotic for worshipping a supposed god who is nothing more than a mystified version of themselves.

But Eleven lets her eyes linger along the planes of Mike’s face, the freckles on his nose, on his dark eyes and feathery hair, and thinks the name fits.

He coughs, face reddening. “Oh, uh. Yeah. I guess so. But, uh, just Mike is fine.”

“Mike,” Eleven nods, tickled by the color on his cheeks.

“El,” Mike returns, shy and awkward on the floor of his basement.

\---

Eleven is silent out of habit, but like most of her habits, it is one instilled in her since birth.

She is to be seen occasionally, and heard never. If spoken to, she might speak back, but it was preferred that she didn’t.

After all, the best servants are invisible.

\---

Mike talks a lot.

He doesn’t like to have too much silence, she finds. Eleven wonders if he even notices he’s doing it, but every time there is a lull or a stretch of quiet, he finds a way to fill it, finds something to say. The longest he’s gone without asking her a question, or pointing something out, or even beginning an entirely new subject is only three minutes and fifty-three seconds. She counted.

Eleven finds it endearing.

The only problem is, Mike seems to want her to answer back. This she is not used to.

Mike’s housemates don’t seem to enjoy quiet either. There are floorboards creaking, bounding steps, and soft ones too, and the clinking of what sounds like glass; loud, upbeat music humming from somewhere in the upstairs of the house, and muffled conversation carrying through the walls.

It blends together into a sort of bright thrum, filling every alcove and inch – the same way Mike’s voice does. He is at home in the din. Eleven could not feel more out of place.

“That’s my family,” Mike sighs to her, rolling his eyes. His annoyance is underlined with something softer, like fondness. Eleven isn’t sure what to make of it.

“Family,” Eleven repeats, deliberate with each syllable. She understands what it means, but it’s a foreign word on her tongue, like so many Mike uses.

“Yeah,” Mike is distracted, staring at the door, listening for approaching footsteps. “Mom gets makes everyone get up super early, even though it’s only Saturday. She’s like that, you know?”

She doesn’t know.

“What about you?” Mike turns to her, all warm eyes and akimbo limbs.

He’s so _interested_. Another thing about him that throws her off guard, yet endears him to her further. He wants to know things - know things about _her._

“What’s your family like?”

Eleven feels herself freeze, blood running cold.

She finds herself staring at the stitching of his socks, mouth clamped tight. She doesn’t know how to answer. She isn’t sure if there’s a word that translates for what fae might equate to such a thing.

Humans flock together, Eleven knows, in this way called family. They build kinship, usually around their actual kin, but not necessarily. They form units, and special rules, about fidelity and bonds. They are… one, as Eleven understands it. They try to base all their decisions, and goals, and desires around one another.

The Unseelie have no use for families.

They have loyalties, certainly. Affiliations, alliances, pledges. Fae marry, initiate, have symbols and ceremonies and seals of devotion. Bloodlines may be acknowledged, but they cross and ravel together so densely that it is hardly worth it. Spawn may be adored, but only briefly, for there were always better delights to be had, and of course, more spawn to be had too.

They were moved by their emotions too powerfully to deny themselves; something preached to Eleven from the beginning of her existence. Desire was the most compelling force of all, and certain ties, certain restrictions like family, like obligation could obstruct the ability to conduct oneself as one wished.

Fae are fickle, as well as eternal, and her court reveled in whirlwind and change. With entire eons at their disposal, what use have they for such _mortal_ limitations as family?

The Unseelie Court, Eleven knows all too well, is a breed of fae with allegiance to themselves, first and above all else.

Mike is still looking at her, with those great, big brown eyes. She looks back, focusing on his nose, on the concerned pinch of his lips. Her own reflection glitters in his irises, and she has no desire to see it.

“Alone,” is all she can think to say, a breathy, meek noise. It eats a hole in the little pride she’s allowed herself to gather.

She starts when Mike rests a hand on her knee, and realizes belatedly that she had begun hugging her legs to her chest. She feels tears prick the back of her eyes. She feels foolish, down to the bones.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Mike tells her quickly, a note of panic in his otherwise measured voice. He’s craning to meet her eyes, beseeching and so soft. His thumb rubs tentative circles into her skin, and yet again, she doesn’t quite know what to make of him.

Humans are supposed to be stupid, but Mike is clever.

Humans are supposed to be ugly, but Mike is beautiful.

Humans are supposed to be perverse, and mean, and easily manipulated, but Mike is kind, and strong.

Mike begins to redden again under her gaze, but he does not look away. He reaches a hand toward her face, and Eleven breathes slowly through her nose, steeling herself. His fingers tremble, but he’s careful as he brushes the fan of her bangs away from her forehead – slow, deliberate.

It sends warm tingles through her skin when the pads of his fingers make contact. It sparks and stutters down her back, and through her legs. Her toes curl.

A breath shakes out of him, as though he feels the brush of electricity too, his face intent.

“You’re okay,” he repeats in a whisper, more firmly.

“Okay,” she whispers back, holding the word close to her heart.

\---

Humans and fae don’t mix, or rather, they shouldn’t.

Disaster is abound – mixing the everlasting with the mortal, combining an ancient magic with a disposable body; the outcome of blurring the lines is unpredictable, perilous.

Eleven is proof of that.

\---

When Mike’s mother calls him up the stairs for dinner –

(“We eat meals together,” Mike says, shrugging at her puzzled face. “It’s kinda lame, but I can’t really get out of it. I tried to eat in my room once, and my parents grounded me for a week.”

“Grounded?”

“Like, punished,” Mike twists his lips, faintly annoyed. Eleven’s heart jumps. She feels a surge of terror, coupled with the urge to wrap him tightly – safe from harm. She puts a hand on his wrist, protectively, and he immediately goes pliant.

“Nothing bad,” he assures her, in a rush, brushing a tentative finger over her knuckles with the hand she isn’t holding. His smile melts her slightly. “They just took away some of my stuff – action figures, my comics. It was just boring.”

She settles. Nods. She doesn’t let go of his hand until his mother calls him again.)

– Eleven is left alone to her thoughts.

And with Mike up there, with his family, where he belongs – she finds herself drawn to the window.

It’s a little thing, high on the wall, but on her tip toes she is able to peer through.

She can’t see the entrance of the woods from here – it’s all paved pathways and grass snipped short where Mike lives. Unnervingly neat, boxed in. As though nature is a decoration, instead of the all-encompassing force that Eleven has known, was born into.

Nature is a mistress – not always a kind one, but one that even fae kings and queens serve and honor.

Humans have carved their own way. They try to make nature bow to them. Eleven finds it equal parts impressive and foolhardy.

Though she cannot see the woods from here, she feels them. It is like a weight on her body, a second skin, a tether around her middle – the woods are in her, even if she is not in them. They call her back, demandingly. She aches to think what should happen if anyone found out she strayed in the first place.

She’s still staring through the windowpane when Mike clomps back downstairs, talking again. He’s smuggled her food, grinning, while she stands lost in thought about how she’ll need to bathe in the creek to wash the smell of human off of her.

This time, when tears brim her eyes, they actually fall.

“El?”

She hears his footsteps pad towards her, slowly. His presence behind her is heated and radiant, and she feels she could sink through the floorboard, become the earth, and lay dormant and content for a hundred years, just from a drop of that warmth.

“What’s wrong?” He inhales sharply when he catches sight of the tears tracking down her cheeks. It makes her shoulders hitch.

She lets him follow her gaze. The window and its curtains fog over and blur in her vision, and she closes her eyes, lashes sticking together. She presses a hand to the cool glass, pained.

There’s a beat of silence, before she hears him swallow, heavy and choked.

“Don’t go,” Mike says, sounding sick, and it plucks at her in a way she has never felt.

He’s sputtering, trying to collect himself, and it makes El feel wretched. She was stupid to come here, to invite herself into his home. To tangle up his feelings, to take the neat pieces of his life and scatter them around.

“I – I mean, you don’t – I won’t… I can’t make you stay if you don’t want to,” Mike trails off, voice small and uncertain. “I just. I don’t know.”

 “Mike,” Eleven breathes, staring at the side of his head. His eyes are obscured by his dark hair, feathering around his temples and closing him off. She squeezes her eyes tighter, clenching her fists. The trees snap in the wind outside.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled then, glancing at her briefly. His shoulders are drawn up, stiff; sullen.

“I mean. I guess I just thought, maybe – you know, you could stay for… longer this time.”

He sucks in a breath, beginning to ramble. “You said… I figured that, since time passes slow in your world, that you could really stay as long as you wanted before someone noticed, and I’d love to have you here – I mean, you know, you’re – we’d have to figure it out but. You said… I thought… I…”

She waits for him to finish, but he doesn’t. His lips curl.

“It was stupid,” he sighs, avoiding her eyes.

Something passes between them. Eleven feels the air turn stale, feels something in both of them stretch taught. Her fingers twitch, as though to touch him, but she thinks better of it.

“Mike,” she says again, the beginnings of a goodbye. She can hardly swallow around the lump in her throat.

Not safe, she wants to tell him.

I’m bad, she wants to tell him

I’ll hurt you, she wants to tell him.

“Yeah?” He turns his eyes on her once again, his eyebrows twisted and worrying his forehead. His lips are pursed, but his eyes are still soft ( _always soft_ ) as they linger on her face. Her heart picks up.

She thinks of what awaits her in the woods. A fate she was born into, and prior to now, had resigned herself to. She considers it – going back. A few short days in her realm, and this would be over. Mike would be gone. Long dead; a memory in the ether, a catalogue of life mostly untouched by her.

The thought doesn’t relieve her, as it should. It only fills her with a great, overwhelming longing – fit, surely, to rupture her being and leave her in a mess of confusion and resentment and _want_.

She’s hesitant, letting only the tip of her pinky finger skate slowly across the back of his hand.

“I want to stay.”

\---

Disobedience is dangerous, Eleven knows. Disobedience is always punished. Desertion is suicide.

The trees are friend to fae.

But the trees also have eyes, and for that matter, Eleven is not entirely fae.


	3. come and paint the world with me tonight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Kesha's 'Rainbow'.

“So,” Mike says, picking at a loose thread on his gloves. He sneaks a glance at El out of the corner of his eye. 

She glides on beside him, like a swan, her bare toes stepping lightly alongside Mike’s heavy winter boots. He slushes and crunches through the snow, but she moves silently and delicately. She leaves no tracks, and for a moment, Mike worries that he might be hallucinating, or talking to someone who was never there in the first place. Or perhaps, just dreaming.

_God, that would suck._

El looks over at him, pale, and pink, and lovely against the white backdrop and the naked trees. She prompts him with her eyebrows, and Mike remembers that he had spoken. He feels the back of his neck prickle with the heat of embarrassment and he squirms inside his coat.

“Are you cold?” Mike finds himself blurting, although that’s not at all what he meant to say. 

She is only clothed in leaves after all, and Mike traces his eyes over the bare skin of her shoulders and smoothness of her exposed arms, searching for gooseflesh or raised hair that does not appear. She doesn’t draw into herself or tuck her arms in for warmth. 

El shakes her head ‘no’, and sweeps her eyes across the muted tones of the little clearing behind the neat and tidy suburbia of Mike’s neighborhood. They’re staying on the outskirts of the woods, where the trees aren’t as densely packed, and one is less likely to become lost and ensnared. Mike is equal parts relieved and disappointed.

He and El agreed on it when they left his house this morning to walk aimlessly through the thickets, away from the prying eyes of his family. After all, it wasn’t as though he could bring her into town – the fact that Mike Wheeler was traipsing around with a girl would attract enough attention by itself, let alone the fact that she isn’t human. 

He almost forgets that fact, in the space between thoughts, before it comes rushing back and he remembers why the voice in the back of his head is worrying and wondering so loudly. 

“Is that a fairy thing?” Mike wonders, “Not being cold?” 

And there’s that familiar eagerness, overcoming him. 

El shakes her head again and presses her lips together. She glances at him fretfully, and Mike meets her eyes without meaning to.

Her eyes are darker underneath the grey sky and shade of the trees. Almost black, they glitter at him, like polished stones. There is something primordial and menacing that lurks in the depths of those eyes, something that punches the breath out of him. But he likes what he sees, he is drawn to it, and does that make him absolutely insane? He finds himself strangely comfortable with that, if it does.

He knows his face is red and he opens his mouth to say something – he isn’t sure what – when she finally speaks. (That’s another thing that throws him; her quietness. He isn’t used to it. What he wouldn’t give to know what she was thinking, to hear what she doesn’t say. Luckily, though, he talks enough for the both of them most of the time.)

“I am,” El begins haltingly, staring down at her feet. She breathes in and out, and tries again. “I am of the winter.”

The words are strange in Mike’s ears. Archaic-sounding, like something from an old novel or a Shakespeare play (which Dustin insists are genius, but always put Mike to sleep).

Mike blinks. “You mean, like, you were born during the winter?”

“Yes. No.” She shakes her head for a third time, and looks resolutely away from his face. “Winter doesn’t end.”

 _The Unseelie_. Mike remembers the name suddenly with tingles, remembers the first time he laid eyes on El, the first time she touched him. Remembers the way her hands trembled and her eyes filled with fright when the name formed on her lips. The way it made her clench and close up the way she is now.

“Bad,” she had said. 

He puts off that question for another time.

“Oh. It’s just always winter, all the time? Where you’re from?” Mike doesn’t understand precisely where that where  _is_ but he wants to. He wants to know everything.

The wrinkles in El’s brow soften very slightly. “Yes.” 

He looks at her again. The snowflakes settling in her curls, catching on her eyelashes, sticking and laying in the leaves that cover her skin – clothing her in sparkling white. Her dark, glittery eyes like swirling thunderclouds, the blue of the veins that show beneath her pearly skin. 

Of the winter. Mike could see that. 

They’ve touched before, but now he wonders if he just neglected to notice key things. If maybe now, here, in the slumbering woods, she would make his skin cold and numb, if it would seep through his skin and into his bones, his blood. Without meaning to, he finds himself reaching for her hand – 

El flinches violently when the fabric of his gloves brushes her knuckles and he makes to pull back, already sputtering apologies. She stops walking suddenly, breath stuttering. She exhales, eyes closing.

“No,” she says, her voice soft and fragmented. “It’s…” 

El trails off, but her body edges forward. Her hands tremble a little when she reaches for him, and he feels frozen in place. She peels his glove off slowly, and Mike bites his tongue, holding his breath. She laces their fingers, incredibly focused, and Mike just stares at her, at the hesitance, the determination on her face.

Their palms settle together, and she releases a sigh that makes a cloud between them, like a puff of wispy, white smoke that nips at his nose. El meets his eyes finally, searching, as though she’s asking for affirmance that she did it right. 

Mike feels a stupid grin threaten to split his face, and he tries to contain it without much success. His cheeks ache, and butterflies have erupted in his stomach and flutter around in his chest, tickling up his throat. It’s one of the best things he’s ever felt. 

“Yeah,” he says, his voice pitching too high and cracking, “You aren’t cold at all.”

Her answering smile is a tiny, bare thing, but it makes her eyes light up bright enough to melt the snow. Mike thinks he could go blind staring back, and it would almost be worth it.  


\---  


Mike’s legs tire after a while, so they find themselves a secluded patch of thickets and sit across from one another, their backs against the trees. It must be around noon. The sun hangs above them, shining and reflecting off the snow in a white glare.

El has her hands buried into the snow, and her head dropped back against the tree trunk, eyes open. 

Mike can feel her watching him. He tries not to stare back, instead staring into the woods and counting how many abandoned birds’ nests or stray twigs and branches he can find as his fingers twitch. 

He wants to say something, but then she might stop looking at him – and while her gaze is excruciating, he can feel himself preening a little. He wonders if she still finds him pretty, or if that’s a thing that’s temporary. He wants to hold her hand again. 

He glances at her quickly, his head turning without his permission. He can hear her inhale, can see her shoulders draw up, but she doesn’t look away. She just keeps staring at him, and Mike can’t for the life of him find any clues in her expression. 

El opens her mouth, hesitant. She looks away now, and Mike thinks her cheeks flush. He sits taller.

“Mike,” she begins, drawing her hands out of the snow. Where it sticks to her skin, it does not melt. 

“Yeah?” He scoots toward her a little, nervous. His stomach tangles in knots.

“You want me to stay.” It isn’t a question.

Mike grins a little, but it falls when she doesn’t return it. “Yeah. Of course –”

“Why?” El asks him, quiet and guarded. It’s earnest but probing, and it settles wrong in Mike’s stomach.

He tries to meet her eyes, without success. “What do you mean?”

Mike watches her take a breath that fills her chest and let it out, silent except for a whistle. Like a tiny, frustrated gust of wind. She buries her hands back in the snow. 

“El?”

Mike barely hears it, the whisper she directs downward:

“Why do you want me?”

His chest hurts suddenly. He feels wounded for her, and he can’t even put words to why. Somehow, that makes it hurt worse. It’s like she’s asking what he wants to _use_ her for. 

It’s _red_ , the thing he feels, like anger but more visceral, more terrible, clawing and tearing up his throat. He almost wants to cry.

It catches in his throat when he says, “I don’t want anything.”

She doesn’t look up, and he feels desperation flood into his blood, making his heart pound.

“Really. I-I mean, I know I ask questions and stuff, but it’s only because I think it’s cool – I think you’re cool, and interesting. I just want to be with you – I mean! Not like _be with you-be with you_ or anything weird! I just really like you. But I don’t want you to do anything for me – or, or –”

“Mike,” El says, firmly.

He’s embarrassed when he answers too fast, “Yeah?”

“I like you too.” 

She says it just like that, artless, honest. Her lips curve up into that tiny smile again, and he feels the air knocked out of him for the billionth time, ghosting into a giant puff between them.

“Oh,” his pulse is still thundering in his ears. “Oh. Okay. Cool.”

“Cool,” she agrees.

She goes back to staring at him, and he beams down at his lap, unable to smother the little laugh that escapes him.  


\---  


The sky has started to split and curl into vibrant purples and oranges, but Mike makes no move to get out of the elements. He’s on his back, and El lays beside him, her eyes fixed on the pink of the clouds as they spread out and puff up like cotton candy.

The snow packed ground is hard and unyielding underneath him, and the cold has long since wormed its way into every bit of him, but he’s reluctant to move, possibly ever. El’s pinky is very nearly touching his in the space between them, and when he idly moves his left foot from side to side it bumps softly into El’s little toe.

“Pretty,” she murmurs without breaking her gaze. “The colors.”

Mike turns to see the way the fading light plays off her skin and paints her gold and baby pink, and makes her wide, wide eyes look almost orange. She looks so warm and unguarded, enraptured and breathing soft. His blood sings. 

“Yeah,” he whispers back, forcing himself to look back to the horizon. 

In truth, Mike’s never held a particular fondness for sunsets, the way that people do in movies and books. He doesn’t find them especially romantic, but then he’s never been entirely certain what makes those stereotypical things like sunsets or beaches at night romantic in the first place.

But Mike is certain that if El asked him to, he’d sit with her and stare at every silly sunset from now until the end of time, and he’d never complain. 

They don’t move or talk again until the sun sinks and draws the rest of the colors away with it, and then El sits up and wraps her arms around her knees. Mike watches the way her muscles coil back up and her back tenses, watches the calm bleed out of her through his peripherals. 

Around them, the wind begins to kick up.

He sits up on his elbows, and asks, “Hey, what’s wrong?”

She doesn’t respond, only tips her head back to stare into the inkiness of the night, her jaw set and eyes hard. Mike feels his heart sink as tears well in them, her chin trembling. Her fingers sink into the snow.

“The light. The colors,” El says, listless. “Gone.”

Mike doesn’t dare draw closer, afraid she might spring away. “Well, yeah, but there’ll be another one tomorrow.”

He watches as her lips drop open, and then press back into a line. A tear rolls down her face.

“El,” he begins carefully, following her gaze and looking up at the moon. It frosts her over in tones of silver and grey. His throat threatens to close up with sheer incredulity. “Was… was that… Have you never seen a sunset before?”

The breath shivers out of her, and she turns her face away from him, as though ashamed. Mike feels like the scum of the earth suddenly. He wishes he had any idea at all what to say. It’s like someone’s taken his brain, tipped it over, and poured all the sense out of him. 

All he can think about is the time he was four years old, chunky and smiley, taking swimming lessons at the community pool. There were a dozen other pre-schoolers there too, wading and splashing through the water, and Mike found himself toddling down the steps to the deep end. 

When the water was to his shoulders, he went to take a step, but the stairs had ended and there was only a drop off into the depths of the pool. He felt the water suck him down like a vortex. The sun disappeared and the chlorine stung his eyes, and he couldn’t scream. 

The lifeguard pulled him out in seconds, he’s sure, but in those seconds where the world literally slipped from under him, Mike was panicked and helpless and full of terror. And though he didn’t know the words for it at the time, he was afraid he was going to die. 

Seeing El cry feels a lot like that.

It feels like ages pass before she sighs, her shoulders shaking minutely. Even like this, tearstained and stony, her teeth bared and the trees snapping around them, she’s beautiful. Mike wonders, for what feels like the millionth time, what it would be like to be destroyed by her, wonders if he’d even mind. 

Finally, she says, heavily, “The mortal realm is beautiful. Sunsets. You.”

Yes, now Mike is certain he’s going to vomit. Or burst into tears, or start screaming, or something vastly inappropriate and incongruous with the explosion of euphoria that bubbles beneath his skin. He’s blind with happiness until he fixates once more on the droop of El’s shoulders. 

Then all the warmth in him cools, and he’s wildly anxious about the silence settling between them. “But?”

El glances at him, and then back at the sky. “It’s… dark. Always dark.” Her words are clipped, as though speaking is a herculean effort. 

“It’s always night there? Where you’re from?” Mike asks softly, thinking of earlier.

She nods.

“Then…” Mike looks down at his hands, suddenly unsure. “Aren’t you, you know – aren’t you happy to see the sunset?”

“ _Yes_ ,” El whispers, squeezing her eyes shut. “Yes, happy, but. Still sad. It _hurts_.”

Mike aches for her, for the words she can’t find. “I understand. It’s like you missed out on this stuff for so long. Like there’s been a whole other world right next to you, and you knew it was there, and even though you never knew anything about it, you were still so sure. You felt crazy, and now you know you’re not, but it – it stays with you.” 

El says nothing, only stares at the horizon, as though she could bring the sun back up through sheer force of will. Mike thinks maybe she could. 

The pink tinted smiles from just twenty minutes ago feel like ages ago, and he loathes the back and forth, the uncertainty of where he, and the “mortal world”, stands in her opinion.

She thinks he’s pretty, but it makes her cry. She wants to stay, but it hurts. She likes him, but she doubts him.

Still, he said he understood and he does. Or at least, he’s trying to. As strange as this (them?) is for him, it must be a million times stranger, and scarier for her. He’s overwhelmed just looking at her, and meanwhile she has to cope with an entirely different dimension, and he’s not exactly a stellar tour guide.

Mike stands, feeling stupendously useless and small. 

“Come on,” he says, and he holds out his hand, trying for a half-smile. “Let’s go home.”  


\---  


Mike pads down the stairs to the basement when his family’s finally gone to sleep, after sulking through dinner and a chewing out for being late for dinner on a school night.

“We have to get your schedules back in order,” his mother had huffed, clearing the table of his half-eaten plate and steadfastly ignoring the eye rolls both he and Nancy responded with. “Christmas break isn’t here yet, you two.”

Mike can’t even fathom going back to school after the weekend he’s had. The linoleum floors and fluorescent lights don’t seem to fit right in his mind. He can’t quite picture them, as though the pop quizzes and wooden desks he’s suffered through his entire life have been shoved into a dark corner of his memory. Like his brain has ignored the better part of twelve years to make room just for El.

He finds he isn’t as disturbed by that as he probably should be. 

He hesitates at the bottom stair, clutching a wide, shiny hardback book in his hands. 

“Hey,” Mike calls softly, and El turns to acknowledge him from where she’s settled over his Dungeons & Dragons board, fiddling with the game pieces. 

“Sorry for taking so long,” he says as he slides in the seat across from her. “I brought you something.” 

El perks up, eyes widening and sparkling the way they do when she’s curious. His heart lifts a little, and he feels a little shy suddenly. 

It’s wonderful and odd how comfortable he’s become with her in a matter of days, but his mind is still a mess of insecurities and stupid fluttery, flowery thoughts. Like the fact that he’s in pajama bottoms that are a little too short, and he’s caught between worrying if his ankles look weird, and secretly hoping their bare toes bump beneath the table.

He shakes himself, sliding his cargo across the table. “It’s a book of constellations.” 

El moves the game board aside and sets her palms flat over the glossy cover of the book, staring down at the picture of Orion on the cover. She glances back up at him, eyebrows pulled down in question. 

“Constellations are groups of stars that make a picture or a pattern in the sky,” he points to Orion, “See, this one is supposed to look like a hunter. There’s his belt, and uh, this line is supposed to be an arrow, and this part here, where the stars make a curve, is his bow.”

El follows his finger, eyes sharp and focused, and then brings her own hand up to trace a connection between all the stars. She looks positively fascinated, and Mike coughs around his next couple of words.

“I know you liked the sunset, so I thought we could go watch it again tomorrow night.”

Her eyes widen further, even though she doesn’t look up at him. She smiles a little, like she can’t help it. She nods wordlessly, and Mike heartens a little. 

“And after,” Mike continues, only a little breathless, “We could try to find some of the constellations. O-only if you want.” 

The smile slides away, and this time she does look up at him. Her eyes narrow now, like she’s trying to look past his face and into his brain, as though she isn’t quite certain what he’s playing at. Mike is already eager to spill everything out to her.

“I just thought maybe you’d want to see that there are some good things about night too. It doesn’t have as many colors, but the sky is super sparkly, and my dad says that one of the good parts of living in Hawkins is that there aren’t a lot of lights like in the city, so the stars look really bright. Not that he ever goes outside, but you know –”

“Mike,” El hushes him, and she looks fond, and that reminds him, inexplicably, of how close their toes are, and how he could brush her knee with his without even moving that much at all. 

Her eyes are wet again, but Mike thinks it might be okay this time. 

“Thank you,” she says, laying both her hands back on the book again, tenderly, as though embracing it. She looks down, and he can see the glitter of her tears like dewdrops on her eyelashes. He shivers. 

“Yeah,” he mutters, caught in her thrall, “No problem.”

Before he can overthink it, he reaches over and sets his hand over hers. He holds his breath. She lifts her head, but this time she doesn’t seem surprised at all, and he feels warm all over. 

Vaguely, he thinks about what the guys would say if he told them he’d spent his entire weekend with a girl. 

It feels like ice water down his spine when he realizes that he may actually have to tell them. He looks up at El, so warm and soft, flipping through the pages of the book idly. For a moment, it seems feasible, and then he thinks of earlier, of how she’s skittish and new to almost everything.

They might freak out, which in turn would freak El out, and Mike isn’t sure he’s well equipped to be the middle man in all of that. But not telling the party is out of the question, they’re a team. And Mike also, maybe, wants to brag a teeny tiny bit about being right about fairies living in Hawkins.

“Hey, El –”

“Mike –”

They both speak at the same time, and Mike chuckles at the tentative look on her face. 

“You first,” he grins. 

Another one of her little smiles. Her fingers twitch under his. 

“In the woods,” El starts, her voice like honey. She turns those eyes on him again, sparkling and warm, and Mike’s head spins. He forgets how to breathe.

Mike wonders if she’s unaware as to her effect. She must know. Must know that his blood boils and his heart hammers and he forgets everything except her face, and her hands, and her voice when she’s near. He feels it must be written plainly across his face, an obnoxious, neon sign communicating to her that he is at her mercy. That she could ask of him his heart, and he’d pull it from his ribs and hand it over. 

And yet, El speaks to him so delicately, acts so hesitantly. She stares at him like she may never see him again, or more likely, like she’s waiting for him to act differently. It’s almost suspicion. As though at any moment, he might decide he doesn’t want her around, or worse. 

(He gets the sinking feeling that “worse” to her is something he can’t even begin to guess at.)

She treads carefully, like she’s completely oblivious to the fact that she’s got him wrapped around her little finger, and nothing, nothing in his brain or gut or heart can dissuade him of the fact that where she is, is where he wants to be. 

Mike shakes himself, and tries to tune back in. It’s worse when they’re touching – the flood of emotion, the churning adoration and enchantment. It’s like the sunset; whenever she holds his hand, everything is painted over in rose gold, his heart stuck in his throat and blood roaring in his ears.

It’s magical.

“You were smaller,” El is saying apprehensively, searching his face. “And… the lights.”

Momentarily, Mike is five years old again, shrieking with laughter and dancing with floating lights, gleaming in the night. The woods he’d been so terrified of turning into something glittery and spectacular.

“So that _was_ you,” Mike blurts excitedly, “I knew it! El, that was incredible, I’ve never seen anything like it!”

Her eyes seem to twinkle. “It made you happy.”

“Well, yeah,” Mike scoffs at himself, giddy and embarrassed all at once. “You basically saved me. Man, you must have thought I was such a total wastoid, crying in the woods at the middle of the night.”

“No,” El says, nonplussed, “You were beautiful.”

“Oh.” Mike feels hot all over. His hand must be sweating, but he can’t bring himself to take it away from hers. “Thanks.”

_Thanks? Way to go, dumbass, real charming. Fucking “thanks”, really?_

“Um,” he clears his throat, floundering. “Was – was I the first, like. First human, I guess, you ever, uh. You ever saw?”

“No,” El presses her lips together, eyeing him as though revealing a grand secret. “But you are the first human to see me.”

Mike’s stomach flips over. “You mean you never talked to any people – uh, humans? Before me?”

She shakes her head. 

He swallows with great difficulty. “Why me?”

El just looks at him, like it’s self-evident, her eyes piercing his. Mike feels tingles trickle and prickle across his skin, and yes. 

He thinks he does know the answer to that question after all.

“After that night,” Mike’s throat feels scratchy. “I thought I saw you. All the time. Whenever I would go through the woods, I – I was always looking over my shoulder. I always thought maybe you were watching me. Like you were still looking out for me, I guess.”

El pulls her hand away and Mike panics for a moment, ready to take it all back. But she just entwines their fingers securely, her breathing soft and even. 

And when she looks up, there it is again; that ancient, smoldering intensity in her face, only this time it’s blurred and softened around the edges like those old black and white photographs, sweetened by something Mike wants to call yearning.

“I was,” she tells him.

Mike feels pinned and breathless, devastated and blown apart by the fire that dances behind her eyes, the crushed pearls that make up her skin, and way her voice – soft but held aloft, like a ballerina mid-leap, a songbird in flight, angel wings brushing across his face – rings and twists in his head, burrowing into his heart. 

He finds himself squeezing her fingers tight, and thinking faintly that perhaps he doesn’t need to tell the party so soon. 

Perhaps he can lose himself in the world of sunsets and stars and clasped hands that El has him swimming in for just a little bit longer.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait! Also, I know it's been a bit slow-going in terms of development/action so far, but expect it to pick up soon ;) Thank you all so much for your love and comments, they warm my heart and inspire me to continue. Your support and enjoyment means everything.


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